I, flotsam.

Certain relatives of mine cling to the fantasy that I will be able to decide where I get a job, so as to live within a few miles of them. While the sentiment is appreciated, and shared, the reality is that I have almost no say in where I end up.

Let's review a few facts. First, the US economy is still in the shitter, if slightly less deep in than a few years ago. Lots of people, regardless of their industry, are moving wherever for whatever job they can get. Maybe there is some profession where you can just up and move where you want and be confident of making a living there, but I'm not sure what profession that would be at this point.

Second, even in good times, academics can almost never pick a city and get a job there. For hundreds of years academics have been moving to whatever University has a position for them. I'm reading a book about Alexander von Humboldt, who was one of the greatest scientists of the late 1700s and early 1800s, and even he keeps going from country to country looking for a patron and encountering academics working far from their own countries. There are extraordinarily few academics who can simply contact a University of interest and based on their scientific reputation be confident of getting a job there. Once you've won a Nobel Prize your chances are good. Barring that, good luck.

Third, I have done what most of the academic establishment says scientists should do, but very few fully do, because it makes publishing and job-hunting that much harder. My work is so damn interdisciplinary and specific that I am unlikely to fit the particular job description a small disciplinary department at a college or university is likely to write. I am on an email list for an online bulletin board for evolutionary biologists called EvolDir, and every few days I get an email for some position somewhere in the world that they are trying to fill. Here are a few of the most recent entry-level faculty positions:
•"There are several openings for Bioinformaticians and Software Developers at the University of Glasgow (UK)."
•The City University of New York seeks candidates with expertise "in tropical ecology, biogeography, evolutionary ecology, and conservation biology."
•" Tel Aviv University (ISRAEL) invites ... applicants who apply modern approaches to investigate fundamental problems in the general area of Plant Ecology. "
•UC Riverside "invites applications for a faculty position in plant evolutionary developmental biology."

These are positions I would bother applying for. This is not to say that I won't find anything, but rather that even if Near My Relatives U does decide to advertise for a new professor, they are more likely to be looking for an expert in the genomic analysis of primate fecal samples than they are a developmental evolutionary demographer. When I am ready to apply for positions, the question will not be, "Is that biking distance from my relatives?" but rather, "am I plausibly qualified for that position and is it a place where my wife is willing to live?" If it is, I'll need to apply. It is most likely that positions I do apply for will be among the relatively few broadly defined positions in evolutionary biology, with no further disciplinary restrictions. I very much approve of such broad-net casting, but it tends to lead to many hundreds of applications, as everyone in the field qualifies, so my chances with any one such position are slim.

If the economy were to improve dramatically, I could plausibly limit my search to within 1000 miles of my family. As it is, that limit will be about 12000 miles.

lebenslauf

I'm a bit uncomfortable with some of these German CVs. The lebenslauf (life run) is the rough equivlent to a curriculum vitae, but it is a lot more personal. Many of the lebenslaufen I have seen contain not only educational and employment infomation, skills and other things relevant to qualifications, but also things that from my frame of reference simply don't belong. What legitmate reason would a potential employer have for wanting to know the applicant's religion, the name and employment of her parents and siblings, what primary school she went to and her photograph?

Will the culture shock ne'er end?

High r strategy in a high k regime

I have thus far received 39 post-doctoral applications. Of these 29 were immediately rejectable on the criteria that the application did not include the documents requested. Most of the 29 I couldn’t even tell which position the applicant was applying for, or that they had read the ad. About half of these also contain a similar mix of muddled excessive politeness and jumbled frilly clauses, as though they are cut and pasted at random from the same absurdist form letter. I have no doubt that these are smart, competent people, and perhaps this broadcast spawning strategy of application works in some fields or some countries, but my experience suggests no circumstance under which it would be effective.

Whenever I am hiring, or reviewing applications, I ask myself if I am expressing any unintended biases. I was warned by a friend to expect a large number of irrelevant applications out of India and China (where indeed most of the applications have come from) and so now I force myself to consider in detail whether each of these applications may be more relevant than it at first appears. So far if there is any doubt I have refrained from putting them in my reject folder, meaning that the 10 applications I haven’t yet rejected outright contain a few that I probably should. They also contain a few well worth consideration.

We listed April 30th as the application deadline, so I hope most of the people particularly interested in our positions here are simply taking their time to prepare a high quality application.

keen but generic interest

The cover letters of the post-doc applications I have received have included statements along the lines of, "I have been following the exciting publications from your lab with great interest." Which is generally hard to believe, as I don't yet have a lab. I have recently receiveced one that makes a statement like this, which begins, "Dear Dr. ," with a space left for the insertion of a name. I can't help but suspect...

Note to those applying for jobs: it is more efective to have and demonstrate interest than to claim it.

Recruiting

I need to recruit some post-doctoral fellows. This sounds fairly simple at first glance, given the general state of the economy and the good reputation of the Institute, but there are a few complicating factors.

First, there is the possibility (depending upon my application) that I, and therefore these positions, will be moving to a different institute in a different part of Germany. I should know by mid-April, but until then I need to be somewhat vague as to the location.

Second, my boss is also recruiting, and effectively has first dibs on any of the candidates except those I independently recruit. So there are a couple of interesting candidates coming through the Institute's training courses, but he plans to offer them positions. In so far as there is a pool of local talent, I can't readily draw on it.

Third, although quite a few people have now seen my review article, I am still not widely known. This means no one is going to be just looking me up to see if I have positions available.

Fourth, I need to recruit some people with fairly specific and distinct skill sets and interests. A statistical demographer, a experimentalist to work with small aquatic invertebrates, and a developmental geneticist to start with. Good candidates for these three positions are likely to be reading three different sets of journals, going to three different types of meetings, and so on. Further, what I will ask them to work on is a bit outside the purview of each field, meaning candidates with specific plans for what research they want to do would have to change those plans considerably to fit within the bounds of the project.

Fifth, Rostock as a location is not a big draw. While not a bad lace to live for a few years, the place doesn't add anything to the appeal of the job for most potential applicants.

Finally, while my Institute is very well known to Demographers internationally, most biologists don't know of it and the biology that goes on here, and may be turned off by applying to a demographic institute.

Post-finally, I've not recruited anyone more senior than an undergrad before, and so I'm learning as I go.

Which all goes to say I am going to have to put some time and work into getting the word out. I frankly doubt I will fill each position in the near future, but I sure will try.

Big grant, small grant application

Applying for a grant is nothing new, but this one is big, at least by the standards of the grants have applied for previously. The Max Planck Society sponsors Independent Research Groups, headed by a promising young scientist to explore some innovative and important niche. My task is to convince them I am promising and young, and that my work is innovative and important. They don't actually say young, they say "early career," for which I qualify, as I just got my PhD last year. I'm also fairly confident that my work is innovative, as everyone I tell about my work tells me that nobody else has thought about the question. The problem is, "nobody else has thought about the question," can be taken to mean, "who could possibly be interested in that?" So I am young and innovative, and my challenge is to seem promising and important.

Assuming I can convince them of these things, more so than the many other applicants, it will be a pretty sweet deal. They will not only give me a significantly increased salary for five years and enough funding to get my experiments going, they will pay for me to hire a couple of graduate students and a postdoc or two. Frankly, this is more of a career advance than I think I am likely to receive at this point.

The nice part, other than the generosity of the award should I get it, is how little work they ask of me for the application. They want only a one-page statement of my Scientific Accomplishments (I'm not sure what these are yet) plus 2 pages of Research Plans. I could give them 20 pages of research plans with little difficulty if my hands worked well, but under the circumstances I'm much happier to give them 2.

How my health issues will work into this whole application is an interesting question. There is no doubt that I would have been more productive this year and in grad school had been healthy, but I doubt that they can or should take this into consideration. The best I can hope for is that one of my letter writers will mention something about dedication to science or gumption or the fact that I just keep coming back, like a bad case of poison ivy.

On a more philosophical level, I can ask this question: if someone has a disability which interferes with their productivity, and is likely to continue interfering with their productivity, should an employer consider how productive the worker would be without the disability, or should they simply asked of each candidate, "how productive is he/she likely to be?" I would like to say the former, but from the employer's point of view, it's hard to make the case against the latter.

On the other hand, my joint problems potentially make me better qualified to think of the questions and tell other people to gather the necessary data to answer them than I am for actual data gathering and analysis. The higher they promote me, the more qualified I may be.